The Division

Ubisoft’s The Division, a third-person shooter/RPG set that mixes elements of Destiny and Gears of War, kicks things off. The game’s set in a gorgeous and gritty recreation of post-apocalyptic New York, running on Ubisoft’s new Snowdrop engine. We’ve disabled the handful of Nvidia GameWorks features to level the playing field. Despite scaling well across all graphics cards the game actually tends to run slightly better on Radeon hardware—at least until the GTX 1080 gets involved.

EVGA’s GTX 1080 FTW commands a slight lead over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition here, though Nvidia’s reference card inches slightly ahead of EVGA’s model when overclocked. Nvidia’s powerful GPU blows AMD’s best cards out of the water, albeit for much more money.

Hitman’s built around IO’s Glacier engine. We tested the game in DirectX 11 mode, because Hitman’s bolted-on DirectX 12 support can be pretty wonky even in the best of times.

The EVGA GTX 1080 FTW’s beefier cooler starts to show its benefits here. Because the card never tops 75 degrees Celsius while it’s running the game, the GPU never starts to throttle back clock speeds, which allows EVGA’s card to deliver higher performance results out-of-the-box than the overclocked Founders Edition, despite the ostensibly higher max clock speeds of the latter.

Next page: Rise of the Tomb Raider

At a Glance

EVGA GTX 1080 FTW

This is the GeForce GTX 1080 you’ve been waiting for. The EVGA GTX 1080 FTW puts EVGA's personal touch on Nvidia’s beastly card, and it's a winner, from its high base clock and custom cooling to its extra 8-pin power connection.